The International Hunt for the Ghost Particle

[Music] buried four thousand eight hundred and fifty feet underground in an abandoned gold mine scientists are attempting to solve some of the biggest mysteries in our universe they're hunting for something so elusive that they have to build massive detectors the size of Olympic swimming pools just to catch them and if all goes according to plan this mega science experiment could answer some of the deepest questions in the cosmos including why we're all here they're looking for time-traveling particles called neutrinos to explain what neutrinos are in why thousands of scientists from around the world are studying them we need a neutrino hunter neutrinos are tiny particles in the electron family they are extremely light and they don't interact they don't hit much at all so for the most part they pass right through us and they're very abundant so abundant that right now there are 65 billion neutrinos passing from you without a care to your existence they're considered fundamental building blocks of matter in essence what we're all made of and they're part of something called the standard model the standard model is to particle physics like the periodic table is to chemistry it's comprised of these twelve building blocks of matter and the particles that help those building blocks of matter talk to each other through the fundamental forces of nature they're also at the heart of one of the greatest mysteries in physics today which is why after the Big Bang did we come into existence the Big Bang was basically a huge bath of energy and as it's cooled and as the universe expanded particles were formed when they meet they annihilate again into a puff of energy and this is great because it conserves all of the laws of nature but in those moments after the Big Bang matter one over antimatter so something weird happened there was some process where there was an imbalance between how matter and antimatter was formed that left us with the tiny bit of matter that we in the universe and some physicists think neutrinos might be the culprit we're looking to see if neutrinos somehow behave differently that would cause this imbalance in the universe said very succinctly we're asking our neutrinos the reason we exist I love saying that the field of neutrino detection is having a major moment physicists are constructing ambitious experiments in exotic locations to up our odds of catching them from sources like cosmic ray showers that are produced in the upper atmosphere we can make them in nuclear reactors we can make them in particle accelerators on earth and these neutrino detectors are marvels of extreme engineering there's IceCube a neutrino detector buried over 2,000 meters underground in the South Pole super-kamiokande in Japan a detector with 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water sitting underneath a mountain snow lab located in an active nickel mine in Canada and finally km3 net which is located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and the latest neutrino detector that just broke ground is dune the deep underground neutrino experiment dude is by far the biggest neutrino experiment that's ever been undertaken in the world the biggest because they're using a particle beam from Fermilab in Chicago to shoot a neutrinos and antineutrinos on a wild 800 mile ride through the earth to South Dakota where they'll be detected just to excavate a mile underground to build the caverns to house these detectors will excavate 800,000 tons of rock which is about the equivalent of the weight of eight aircraft carriers so building these detectors is like building a ship in a bottle we have to build components above ground that will fit down the shafts that we can assemble underground South Dakota may seem like an obscure place for a billion dollar neutrino detector but it actually has historical significance in the 1960s a chemist named Ray Davis constructed one of the first solar neutrino experiments in a gold mine which at the time wasn't considered a successful operation ray Davis's experiment came up quite short as if somehow the electron neutrinos were disappearing on their way from the Sun to the Homestake detector in south dakota i would say for a long time people didn't believe ray Davis's experiment but eventually ray Davis was vindicated as physicist understanding of neutrinos evolved we now have confirmed that electron neutrinos coming from the Sun were oscillating to other flavours of neutrinos and therefore not showing up in ray Davis's detector as electron neutrinos and those oscillations are key not only do neutrinos pass through matter with ease they also have split personalities or what physicists call flavors so neutrinos come in what we call three different flavors electron neutrino muon neutrino or tau neutrino this is why neutrinos are so fascinating if neutrinos oscillate they must have some mass and that is the potential key to understanding why the universe has mass to begin with dune will carry on Davis's legacy tracking the way a neutrino oscillates or changes flavors when it interacts with atoms and they're going to use liquid argon time projection chambers to observe them which sounds like something ripped straight from a cartoon liquid argon time projection chambers are precision technology on a massive scale capable of producing photographic images of particles as they travel through the detector for instance you can tell the difference between the flavors from the trail they leave behind while the electron bounces around and produces a shower like a ping pong ball the muon is like a bowling ball and it just travels straight through the detector in a long line the construction for dune is a mammoth undertaking and won't be fully operational until 2027 the hope is that dune could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the universe we all live in or unlock a whole new class of physics or both if history is our guide when we take advantage of a newer kind of detection technique and embark on such an ambitious experiment we're likely to find things that we didn't expect to find for more science documentaries check out this one right here don't forget to subscribe and keep coming back to seeker for more videos

Channel: Seeker

Views: 1,461,607

Rating: 4.8934665 out of 5

Keywords: neutrinos, neutrino, ghost particles, science experiment, big bang, universe mysteries, neutrino hunter, Bonnie Fleming, Fermilab, what is a neutrino, building blocks of matter, what is matter made of, what is matter, standard model, particle physics, forces of nature, antimatter, neutrino detection, south pole, SNOLAB, KM3net, DUNE, Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, quantum mechanics, liquid argon time chambers, Super Kamiokande, time projection chambers, Seeker, focal point

Id: dnJW6wjnk1E

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rspix000]

https://imgur.com/a/Drulo7A Needs updating for Higgs

[u/[deleted]]

Some thing tells me this particle has nothing to do with ghosts...

[u/OliverSparrow]

This is just a bit old. Neutrinos are far too light (several noughts one eV/c² ) to account for the missing mass, and every search for WIMPS to date has come up blank. (Except Sasso, which keeps generating a seasonal signal that they assign to the Earth's movement with and against the galaxy's rotation. But nobody else can find it.) So the missing matter is either an artefact - it follows from general relativity, but that may be a special case of a more general truth - or its exotic, perhaps axion nuggets. (Axions are hypothetical particles needed to maintain accounting for parity in certain interactions.) As to the missing anti-matter, nobody knows but it's not down to neutrinos. Perhaps the Dirac equation is literally true and antimatter is ordinary matter time reversed. So it was created in equal quantity in the early instants of the Big Bang but went haring off in a different time direction. That would make baryonic eight rather than 4% of what exists, still leaving a gap to fill with Dark Something, which we remain unable to detect.

The hierarchy problem asks why gravity is so weak as compared to the other forces. One answer is that it is confined to dimensions that we can't reach, and only weakly leaks into our spacetime. The Higgs portal may be the means by which this leakage occurs, and that's where axions come in. (Also massive neutrinos, although they don't do anything much.) In truth, nobody has a clue but we are at least blanking out those bits of state space which we know are incompatible with experimental results.